June 20th already. I'm working in downtown Los Angeles full time in order to save money for my film. I ride a commuter train 40 minutes down into town. We all pour off the train at Union Station and I run to my bus that takes me cross-town. I was taking the subway for the first week but couldn't stop thinking about what an Earthquake is like in a subway. The bus cuts right through the garment district and dozens of condemned tenement buildings. This section of town is a long way from gentrification. The poverty is harsh. From the eighth floor where I work I can look over the 10 freeway's blur of cars back toward downtown. The view is surreal to me. I think I could go just about anywhere in the world and feel less a foreigner than I do in Los Angeles. Yet there I am. My job is to help Hiroko who is this sweetheart from Japan. We work for a publishing middleman, a really smart, good guy. He reps several different publishers in S. California. Hiroko keeps his place in order and my job is to help her with the thousands of catalogs that come in and eventually must go out. I've relabeled at least six thousand of them since I started. Its monotonous work so I have time to daydream, which is really nice. After a year of school my mind is tired.
Greta, who is the women I found to help produce my film, has turned out to be really solid so far. I sent her the script and she broke it down. The number she came up with is around 28 thousand dollars. Heartbreaker. I came up with about the same thing and hoped I was overestimating everything. That's the dream budget so now we have to start the hustling. She thinks we'll need 10 days to shoot it; we'll probably have to do it in less. She's going to try and make a deal with Lietuvos Kino Studio that will make them executive producers and get us free props, costumes and heavy discounts on crew. We'll see.